Kurt Michael Friese

Chef Kurt Michael Friese is the founding leader of Slow Food Iowa, serves on the Slow Food USA National Board of Directors, and is editor-in-chief and co-owner of the local food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. A graduate and former Chef-Instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, he has been Chef and owner, with his wife Kim McWane Friese, of the Iowa City restaurant Devotay for 15 years. Devotay is a community leader in sustainable cuisine and supporting local farmers and food artisans. Friese is a freelance food writer and photographer, with regular columns in 6 local, regional and national newspapers and magazines, and his 1st book, A Cook's Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland was published by Ice Cube Press in 2008. His next book, Hot Spots on the Chile Trail, written with Gary Nabhan and Kraig Kraft, was released in the spring of 2011 by Chelsea Green.

He lives with his wife Kim, and his dog Bacchus, in rural Johnson County, Iowa

I am The Man.
I do not mean that in the “I’m the best, I’m the coolest” sense of the phrase.
I am The Man.
I mean that in the sense of the implication it has taken these last few decades.
I am The Man. I am The System. I am The Dominant Paradigm.
I did not build the system, did not create the dominant paradigm, but to try to claim that I am not of it – that I do not benefit from it – is to shut my eyes to self-evident truth. None of us be

Like (seemingly) every single writer and aspiring writer in the US, I was jumping up and down and scaring my pets when I heard about the idea of Amtrak offering “residencies” to writers. As both a writer and a rider, not to mention bona fide train geek, this seemed like one of those Celestine Moments, the confluence of two great loves in my life.
A touch of background: A couple of writers were conversing about how/when/where they like to write. They were doing this

In the eleven years between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, quite a few arguments took place regarding the future of the nascent nation. One of the lesser ones was over the naming of a National Bird. Writing to his daughter on the subject of his choice for the symbol in 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote “Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turkey is peculiar to ours.” I’ve often wondered if there would have been an effect on

Since the City Council recently took up consideration of an ordinance regarding what the press has called “growing complaints about inappropriate behavior downtown” by people who are very broadly referred-to as “homeless,” a number of people have been asking my opinion on the matter. This is likely because of my dual role as a downtown business owner and executive chef at Iowa City’s only homeless shelter.
At Shelter House, my task has been to build what I call a “micro-apprenti

For years people and organizations from Frances Moore Lappé to Slow Food have sought to repair and restore our broken food system, making noticeable but still negligible progress. Surely more people today are aware that there’s a problem, and admitting that is the first step, as they say.
Thus far, all of these wise, talented and dedicated people have been navigating by the stars in an endless sea of industrialization and fake food. Despite hundreds, perhaps thousan

I was raised in the fast food test-marketing capitol of the United States. Nearly every major fast food chain and prepared grocery product company tests its new ideas in Columbus, Ohio. Twenty major fast food companies (they prefer the term “quick service”) are headquartered in the Columbus metropolitan area, including White Castle, Bob Evans, and Wendy’s.
When I was five years old my father took me to the very first Wendy’s on its very first day, after which we crossed Br

W.H. Auden once said of legendary food writer MFK Fisher “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”
This is how I feel about Elissa Altman.
I am far from the first to say so. Altman was once described as “The illegitimate love child of David Sedaris and MFK Fisher,” which is also quite fitting, since she approaches her craft the way she does her life, with humor and love, and not without some occasional sarcasm.
She wie

They’ll tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case perhaps you should make an exception. In A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories, April Bloomfield delivers exactly what the book’s cover implies – a straightforward approach to food from a working class Birmingham girl who found her niche.
As a child in England, Bloomfield wanted to be a Policewoman, but circumstances conspired as they so often do and she followed her sister into cooking school. Unlike he

As you may have heard, I started a campaign last fall that I called “Raise the Bar.” It was an effort to lift state restrictions on infusing alcohol in restaurants and bars. Our own Sen. Joe Bolkcom crafted the idea into bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate nearly unanimously, 48-2. Recently, behind closed doors in the Iowa House State Government Committee, the bill was quietly euthanized. No explanation given, no word on who killed the bill or why.
A little background: What

Photo from the video Tamar Adler Talks About An Everlasting Meal.
Editor’s note: It’s unanimous these days: Cooking food from scratch at home is one of the best ways to eat sustainably without breaking the bank. It also enables eaters to easily support food producers who use environmentally sound, ethical, and humane practices. But most Americans can’t pull this off regularly. We recently invited Kurt Michael Friese and Tamar Adler — two people who have strong feelings about th

“I didn’t have time to think about being scared.”On August 28th, hundreds of farms in upstate New York were destroyed by massive floods caused by Hurricane Irene. No one predicted the flood water would come as quickly as it did, nor the amount of water and force that accompanied it. This is one farmer’s story: […]

Whether pepper gardening is your passion, or you’re just getting started with that first pot of plants, from now through October you can visit the gardens at New Mexico State University’s Fabian Garcia Science Center in Las Cruces. There you’ll see peppers being grown the way the pros do it, and possibly pick […]

Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the pioneers of the native- and slow-food movements, and as an ethnobotanist, his interest has long lain in the effects that climate change is having on plant populations. Along with Iowa chef, gardener, writer and slow-food advocate Kurt Friese and chile pepper agroecologist Kraig Kraft, he fired up an […]

It seems that over the past few years, there have been a number of books that make us think about food, where it comes from, and how it impacts our health. I’m thinking of Michael Pollan’s many top-selling titles, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle… the titles are […]

Chasing Chiles co-author Kraig Kraft has a lot to tasy to his fellow New Mexicans about proposed chile labeling laws… The news coming from New Mexico’s chile industry is disheartening. In 2010, a meager 8,700 acres were harvested, the smallest amount in 37 years. Facing stiffer competition from places overseas with cheap and abundant labor, […]

Climate change is the issue of our time. Its ill effects will fall heaviest on the people who have least contributed to it: billions in the global south. But no one will escape the impact of the warming climate, and one place it will manifest most obviously is on our plates. If we look at […]

When news about the hottest beer in the world, Ghost Face Killah, went national, the staff at Boulder’s Twisted Pine Brewing was a little nervous. After all, they’d named the beer, which is made with ghost peppers, after rapper Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan without asking for his permission. But this week, Wu-Tang’s manager […]

Kurt & Kraig went out to LA and made dinner for Kai Ryssdal and the crew of Marketplace from American Public Media. It aired on their show on Friday, April 29, 2011: There are more than 10,000 varieties of chili peppers, and they are big business. But climate uncertainty is affecting the cultivation of some […]

In an article posted on The Atlantic’s website last week, Gary Paul Nabhan, co-author of Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail, addressed the relationship between farming in the Southwest and climate change—both food production and food security have been cast into question with the growing scarcity of water and unpredictable growing […]

Facing wild weather and dwindling water resources, a pepper grower says it’s time to rethink agriculture It is spring, and I am kneeling with a few friends in front of the composted soil of the hillside terraces in my orchard-garden in the desert borderlands of Arizona. It is planting day, and as we place each […]